Imagining a Fallout 4 Without Fast Travel
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I'd like to highlight a blog post I recently read on Gamasutra from Christopher Gile, who proposes five changes to the Fallout 4 gameplay formula that he imagines could be implemented if the developers removed fast travel. It's an interesting thought experiment, although it also shows how central the mechanic has become to the gameplay formula Bethesda has used for their last several titles. Here's a snippet:
3) Questing
With the removal of fast-travel we can no longer assume a player can just instantly be somewhere. That isn't a shocking statement, but it is worth thinking about how that impacts quest design. The classic setup of a quest is 1)Talk to a person, 2)Go do something for them, 3)Return and tell them that you did the thing.
Remembering that a player no longer can just instantly be where you want them to be, how can we make this whole process less cumbersome, or at least involve less back and forth (which we should probably get rid of anyways)?
First, why does the player have to keep going back to the quest giver to report progress and then finally completion? I mean, the player does have a radio strapped to their arm. I know that radio tech in the Fallout universe isn't perfect but it is a a work of fiction and the technology is clearly possible. Fallout 4 could just say that radio tech in Boston is much better then it was in the areas the previous games covered. The series isn't so devoted to the purity of its lore that it is above throwing in these kinds of things for convenience.
You could use the radio to get quests (you already can, but only for a couple procedurally generated ones), move quests forward (instead of always having a face-to-face), or even completing quests. How you would get the reward for completion might need a bit of hoop-jumping if done over the radio but they can just mail it to you and can you pick it up later.
There is no need for the endless and repetitive back and forth of going into town to get a mission, going into the field to complete the mission, going back into town to talk to them again to complete the mission, only to get a new mission from them and then go back into the field again. A 2-way radio could streamline the questing process that gives the player more time doing and less time traveling. The back and forth is annoying even when you can simply teleport all over the place, but when you actually have to hoof it back and forth, it sucks.
The radio could also be used to call up companions. The game already has a problem where it is very easy to lose track of where they are. You could just call them up, ask them to come and they will arrive a couple of hours of game time later. Dogmeat, might not be able to have his own radio, but just have someone watch him and use it for him, letting him bark into the radio. That would be adorable. I would radio Dogmeat all the time just to talk to him.
